The nearer life, valued by what it’s near to — not by what it contains.
A common shorthand treats “worldly” as simply the opposite of “spiritual” — as though a tradition that talks about dunya must be instructing believers to disengage from ordinary life. The term itself resists that reading before any theology is even applied to it.
Dunya derives from an Arabic root (d-n-w) carrying senses of nearness, lowness, and closeness — the life nearest to us, immediate and tangible — as distinct from al-akhirah (the hereafter), derived from a root meaning “the last” or “the ultimate.” Islamic sources present the two as inseparable rather than opposed: one transient, one permanent; one the sphere of action, the other the sphere of consequence. The instruction is rarely to abandon dunya but to live it in a way that answers to akhirah — a temporal stage valued by what it’s oriented toward, not treated as worthless in itself.
Comparative work on modern Islamic eschatology traces how differently 20th-century scholars have cashed this relationship out in practice. Badiuzzaman Said Nursi and Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas share the basic dunya/akhirah framework but diverge sharply in how they present its implications for how a life should actually be lived. Source: Jafar Paramboor, “Islamic Eschatological Discourses: Comparing Between the Conceptions of Badiuzzaman and Al-Attas,” AL-AFKAR: Journal for Islamic Studies, 6(4) (2023), 803–823.